A Superior Death

by Nevada Barr

  “Anybody home?”

  “Just us chickens,” came the reply. Anna’s eyes adjusted and she saw who had spoken. Sandra Fox, wearing yellow Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian print shirt, sat at the wooden table in Jo’s kitchen. Salt and pepper and napkins mixed in with samples of pond slime were shoved to one side. A leather-bound portfolio lay open over most of the table. Delphi was circled neatly between the table legs. “Pizza Dave brought us. He’s doing water quality today.” Sandra explained her and the dog’s presence.

  Anna let herself in. The sink was piled high with dirty dishes. Half-consumed edibles littered the countertop. A bee buzzed around a Pepsi can. A torn pizza box was open on the stove. Three slices, curling up at the edges, lay beside a bowl of soggy corn flakes garnished with the lid of a petri dish. Heartbreak was not a good homemaker.

  “Glad you’re here,” Sandra said. She sniffed the air and smiled. “The place could use a little swamping out.”

  “Looks like home to me,” Anna returned. She sat in the chair next to Sandra. “Where’s Jo?”

  “Upstairs getting her other picture albums. I guess there’s quite a few.”

  For the first time Anna looked at the book on the table. It was an old-fashioned scrapbook. Affixed to the thick black paper with ornate corner holders, the color snapshots looked anachronistic. None of the people were familiar at first. Then the clothes and the hairstyles peeled away the years and Anna recognized Denny in bell-bottoms and a beard. Jo had changed very little. The seventies had seen the same long straight hair and owl-like glasses. In fifteen years it seemed all Jo had done was exchange her army surplus jacket for a polypropylene Patagonia.

  “We’ve been looking at photo albums all afternoon,” Sandra said. “I don’t know whether your life flashes before your eyes the moment before you die, but I’m here to tell you it flashes before everybody else’s the moment after.”

  “Must be kind of weird,” Anna said. For a blind woman to sit looking at pictures was the unspoken half of the thought. Unvoiced though it was, Sandra heard it.

  “Not really. I’d like to see David and Joseph Muench’s stuff. I’d give my left tit to see Ansel Adams photographs of Yosemite. But album snapshots are for talking over, not looking at.” Sandra poked a well-manicured index finger randomly at the open book. “ ‘There I am with Aunt Gertie in front of the old Packard. That was my first grown-up dress. Mom had to stuff tissue in my bra so the darts wouldn’t fold over. My first high heels. Look how my ankles buckle.’ ”

  Anna laughed. “You’ve made your point. How’s Jo doing?”

  “Hard to say. She doesn’t cry. At least not in front of me. She’s not crying over the pictures. She’s proving something to herself. That Denny really loved her, is my guess. All that history’s got to prove something, right?”

  “Something besides persistence?”

  “Once they’re dead, they can never make it up to you.”

  “And you can never make it up to them,” Anna said. “There’s nothing left but to rewrite history.”

  Maybe next weekend, when the Kamloops dive was behind her, she would take Zach’s ashes out and sprinkle them in the crystal waters of Five Finger Bay. Molly would be relieved. Christina would cry. What would she do? Anna asked herself. The gesture was purely symbolic. Seven years of memories couldn’t be thrown overboard so easily.

  “Got them.” The voice came at the same instant as Jo’s footstep on the stair. Unconsciously Anna and Sandra composed their features into sympathetic lines. “Oh. Hi, Anna. I was just showing Sandra some old pictures of Denny and me.” She set two more albums on a coffee table under the picture window. Outside, a snowshoe hare nibbled at the grass beneath the picnic table. A whiskey jack eating crumbs hopped down the bench just over its neatly folded ears. Grief’s half-finished sandwiches were a boon to somebody, Anna thought.

  Jo closed the album on the table as carefully as if it were one of Shakespeare’s original folios and replaced it with another. This one was more what Anna expected to house a young girl’s memories: avocado-green padded leatherette with orange flower decals pasted haphazardly over it.

  Jo stood between Sandra and Anna and opened the book. She pointed a finger marred with a broken and blackened nail at the first snap. “That’s me when I was twenty-four. Isn’t that sundress a stitch? That’s the sorority house I lived in in Santa Barbara behind me. We never did fix that broken step.”

  Sandra wasn’t missing an image.

  Anna and Sandra did all that was required of them, which wasn’t much. They nodded and asked meaningless questions, helping Jo to talk herself out. In the days since her husband’s death, Jo had lost four or five pounds and hadn’t washed her hair. The skin beneath her eyes was puffed and old-looking. Anna touched the gray that ran in zigzag lines through her own braided hair. Death aged people. If they were lucky it left in its wake some grain of wisdom. Usually it left only a sore place, like a weak muscle, a part of the psyche that would buckle first under pressure.

  “Here’s another one of Denny,” Jo was saying. Her voice was hard, as if she kept it that way, knowing his name must be said. “We were going to a dance or something. He had this Viking thing. You know, when they died they were put on their ship and the ship was put out to sea and sunk. Only not quite Viking. He wanted to be put aboard a Spanish galleon or an old Civil War gunboat, all decked out, then sunk where there’d once been a reef. He had this mental picture of the fish coming to live on the wreck with him.” She stopped short as if she’d realized the direction her words were going.

  Anna snapped out of the trance she’d dropped into. She looked at the photograph that had stimulated the remarks. A young Denny Castle, maybe thirty-one or -two, sporting a handlebar mustache, stood beneath an oak tree in front of a stone building. He was wearing a turn-of-the-century ship captain’s uniform. Anna schooled her voice. The information about how the body was dressed had not yet been released. She, Ralph, Lucas, and Tattinger knew. And whoever had put Denny in the engine room. “May I?” She peeled back the clear plastic that held the pictures on the page, lifted the snapshot out and held it up to the light. The cap, the jacket with black braid at the cuffs, the eight brass buttons, were the same as she remembered them from Jon and Bobo’s videotape.

  “That’s a wonderful costume,” she said.

  “It’s not a costume,” Jo told her, retrieving the picture from profaning hands as soon as was polite. “It’s authentic. It belonged to Denny’s great-uncle. He sailed the Great Lakes in the twenties.”

  “Did he go down on one of the ships?” Sandra asked.

  “No. He lives in Florida. He owns a chain of laundromats there, I think. Or did.”

  “This picture was taken a while back,” Anna said.

  “In 1981.”

  “Did Denny keep the uniform?”

  “He must’ve. Why?” Jo and Sandra were looking at Anna suspiciously, as if they thought she would offer to buy the dead man’s clothes for a costume party before the corpse was decently in the ground.

  Anna ignored Jo’s question. “Do you know where it is?”

  “Probably at Mother Gilma’s,” Jo replied coldly. “He left a lot of things in his mom’s attic.” As she replaced the picture in the album, the sleeve of her blouse fell away from her arm and Anna saw again the blue-green scars she’d associated with abalone diving on the west coast. Did Jo dive? The man she loved was making a fool of himself over another man’s wife. It was the best reason Anna could think of for feeding one’s husband to the fishes.

  The pathology of humanity, coupled with the smell of decaying food in the kitchen, suddenly threatened to overwhelm. Muttering half-listened-to excuses, Anna stood and let herself out through the screen. The luna moth was still there. The hare and the jay were gone. She trotted to the dock and loosed the Belle Isle from the cleats.

  Ralph Pilcher could teach her by example. In less than twenty-four hours she would be donning cold water gear with its claustrophobic layers, di
ving the deepest she had ever gone. Divers-the ones who lived to be old divers-prepared for a dive mentally as well as physically. A mind cluttered with what-ifs and other people’s heartaches couldn’t tend to the business of survival.

  TEN

  Amygdaloid dock looked like suburbia on a Saturday afternoon. The pier was lined on both sides by boats and one was tethered crosswise at the end. Half a dozen hibachis smoked on the rough planking. Clothes and towels hung from rigging. Beer-bellied men sat in webbed lawn chairs. Two teenage boys played a delicate game of Frisbee over the heads of an unimpressed audience. A little girl tossed bits of hot dog bun to Knucklehead, the camp fox.

  Anna counted three minor violations before she’d cut power. Two she would attend to. The black and tan cigarette boat moored in her slot was ousted. The little girl would be educated. The Frisbee players would go unpunished. Park policy insisted Frisbee was an inappropriate activity in the wilderness. Anna knew it for a quick way to Zen and chose to let people worship in their own way.

  A couple of fishermen from Two Harbors jumped up from their lawn chairs to tether the Belle’s lines to the dock. They were good boaters, the kind the Park Service could count on to bail out their less qualified brethren. Anna was always glad to see them in ISRO’s waters.

  The 3rd Sister was moored near the end of the dock, her deck piled with diving gear. Hawk sat on the bow staring into the water. Anna hoped he wasn’t seeing too much trash on the channel floor. It had been six weeks since she and Ralph dove around the major docking points, trying to clean up new garbage while leaving undisturbed the garbage old enough to have been transmuted by the passing of years into Important Historical Artifacts. In its four-thousand-year human history, ISRO had been farmed and mined and fished, hunted and burned and logged. The areas where refuse was traditionally tossed could be archaeological treasure troves.

  Holly, her dark hair curling close around her face, was bent over a grill all but hidden by inch-thick steaks. Three men, all of an age and dressed alike enough to have come off the same page in an Eddie Bauer catalogue, drank Leinenkugels and got in her way.

  Despite Denny’s death, Holly and Hawk had gone ahead with the trip. Anna doubted it was callousness. Diving would be their way of bidding him goodbye. And they probably needed the money. Summer concessionaires-the smaller individual businesspeople not backed by the big money of the corporations allowed to run concessions in parks, National Parks Concessionaires Incorporated or T.W. Services-often held on by their fiscal fingertips from one season to the next.

  Anna wandered up the dock answering questions, admiring dead fish, and-one of a ranger’s most difficult jobs- declining free beers.

  “How’s it going, Hawk?” she asked when she reached the 3rd Sister. His eyes left the water briefly, flicked over her face, and returned to whatever had held them before. “Okay,” Anna said. “I can live with that.” She stood for a moment watching the northern sun play at Midas, turning water and air to burnished gold.

  Holly turned the last of the steaks and looked up. “Hawk’s being a jerk,” she said with a touch of genuine malice Anna had never heard before when she spoke of her brother. Hawk shot his sister a black look. Seeing the Bradshaws at odds was like watching two of the faces of Eve snarl at each other.

  At a loss for words, Anna polished the toe of her unpolishable deck shoe against the back of her calf and said nothing. “Don’t sulk,” Holly ordered her tartly. “It’ll only encourage him. Want a steak? Sorry. I forgot you are a vegetable-arian. Want a carrot stick?”

  “No, thanks,” Anna declined. “I’m just passing through.” She smiled at the young men. They seemed subdued for three Type T personalities out on an expensive adventure and she wondered how long Hawk and Holly had been generating foul weather.

  She left them under their dark cloud and walked back into the sunlit picnic that had spread its blanket over the remainder of the dock. She spent a few minutes sitting on the edge of the pier talking with the child who’d been feeding the fox, explaining that Knucklehead had kits hidden in the woods and she needed to teach them to hunt. If they learned only to beg for hot dog buns, come winter, when the bun market crashed, the kits would starve.

  It was only a half-truth, but Anna hoped it would suffice. The facts were a little less copacetic with the balance of nature. If the fox became a pest, begging close enough to present the slightest danger of tourists being bitten, of even suffering too many foxy thefts, eventually Lucas Vega would have her killed. Anna told that bedtime story to grown-up perpetrators. Little girls got the whitewashed version. She wanted them all to grow up to be rangers.

  “Keeping the faith?” It was Hawk. He watched the girl meandering back toward her home barbecue. “She’s probably going for a fresh supply of hot dog buns.”

  “Probably.”

  “You’re patient,” Hawk said.

  “On the second offense I shoot them.”

  Hawk was supposed to laugh but he didn’t. “Sorry I was a jerk. Since Denny died there’s been a lot of that going around.”

  “I know what you mean.” Anna was thinking of Scotty’s alcohol-ravaged face, Jo’s eyes swollen with tears shed and unshed, of herself poking at everybody’s boils trying to prod them into telling her something that would make sense out of the chaos in the Kamloops‘ engine room.

  “Can I buy you a beer?” Hawk asked.

  “Let me slip into something less governmental and you’re on.”

  “Meet you at the ranger station,” Hawk said. Finally he smiled.

  Midas’s touch turned both the smile and the man to gold. Anna felt a dangerous melting as she watched him walking back toward his boat. Bulk was of no use to divers. Their bodies were lean and wiry, the proportions natural, the endurance of the career divers just short of supernatural. For a dizzy moment, Anna contemplated the ramifications of that endurance.

  “Stop it, you horrid old woman!” she whispered to herself and hurried up to the station feeling neither horrid nor old. She felt better than she had in days, since Chris and Ally had brought their homely comfort into her wilderness. Enjoying being pleasantly foolish, she combed her hair out. Crimped from being confined so long in braids, it fell in waves down around her shoulders. It went against the heat of her mood to put on a lot of clothes, but she’d not yet steeled her thin Texas blood to the northern summer. She pulled on Levi’s and a sweatshirt.

  Hawk was sitting on the steps when Anna came out. The long brown necks of four Leinenkugel bottles poked up from a paper sack between his knees. The gloom that had hung about him as he’d hunkered on the 3rd Sister’s bow had gathered round again. Anna could see it pushing down the back of his neck, bowing his shoulders. She gathered the copper mass of hair away from her face and stuffed it down the neck of her sweatshirt.

  “So, what’s up?” she asked as she sat beside him. “You look like a man with the bends.”

  “Do I?” He opened a bottle of beer and handed it to her but forgot to open one for himself. Anna took a drink. She loved the beers of the Upper Midwest. The Germans had truly mastered the brewer’s art.

  Hawk stared down the slope toward the water where it shimmered yellow and blue, the sun still clearing the trees though it was after seven. It crossed Anna’s mind that he had come not so much to be with her but because on her front steps he would not be with Holly and yet not be alone.

  Content to drink his beer and fill the emptiness next to him, she shifted mental gears from romance to contemplation of nature. Humans were herd animals, like the moose. Sometimes even the most independent needed to clump up, hip and shoulder touching, protecting their soft flanks from the wolves.

  “Ever seen a wolf here?” Anna asked.

  “No. Diving’s a noisy business. On shore we’re either jamming jugs or hosting a party.”

  Anna nodded. The sound of the air compressor filling scuba tanks or the chatter of humans would keep the wolves deep in the woods.

  “You bringing Denny up tomorrow?” Haw
k asked, his eyes still on the glittering channel.

  “Yeah. Around noon is my guess. There’s an FBI guy flying in from Houghton to be on the scene.”

  “A diver?”

  “No.”

  Hawk shrugged slightly and Frederick Stanton was dismissed as having no real relevance. “I wish you’d leave him there,” Hawk said suddenly. “Jo’ll bury him on land. Plant him down in the dirt like a turnip with a slab of marble at his head to hold him there. That’s not for Denny. His body pumped full of chemicals to keep it from rotting, a Sunday-go-to-meetin‘ suit moldering down around his bones. On the Kamloops he’d float forever, flipping divers the bird and guarding the lake. Leave him.”

  “Can’t.” Anna said. “It’s against the law. It’s even illegal to scatter the ashes of a cremated corpse in a national park.”

  “Even if they had a Golden Eagle Pass?” Hawk said, but he didn’t smile and bitterness took the humor out of his words.

  Anna didn’t reply. She finished her beer and he opened another for her without asking. She took it. “I saw a picture of Denny over at Jo’s today. He was wearing an early-twentieth-century ship captain’s uniform,” Anna said, watching Hawk’s face. His expression never changed, only hardened slightly. But their bodies touched from shoulder to hip and Anna felt a current run through him that he could not hide. “Did you ever see that picture?”

  “Yeah. Well, no. I think I remember the uniform. Denny might’ve worn it once or twice.” Hawk’s voice was heavy with indifference and his eyes focused keenly on nothing. He was not a good liar. Anna liked him for that. She doubted she would like the reason he had to lie.

  “What happens to the Third Sister now?” she asked. “Does it go to Jo?”

  “She’s been wanting to get her hands on it, turn it into a research vessel. A floating freshwater lab,” Hawk said with disgust. Anna imagined he viewed the 3rd-Sister-as-lab much as Jacques Cousteau might view a desk job. “She might’ve eventually weaseled it-and Denny-out of the diving business but Denny left the boat to Holly and me. It’s in his will. He told us so, anyway.”